Kyle Seager, long-time Mariners third baseman, known for terrorizing my Texas Rangers throughout his career, announced his retirement recently. Actually, in a sign of the times, his wife tweeted the announcement. I saw that he had hit 242 homeruns in his career with a .251 batting average. That made me wonder if that was the closest a player’s final homerun and batting average totals were to each other (ignoring the fact that one of them is a percentage and the other an integer).
I knew Bill James had done something like this back in the ’80s when he created the Power/Speed number. He wanted to find players with the best combination of homeruns and stolen bases. To do so, he used the harmonic mean of the two numbers. The formula for finding a combo between two categories, x and y, is: (2 * x * y) / (x + y). As the values in the category rise and stay in proximity to each other, the combo score goes up. For a season with 30 HR and 30 SB, the Power/Speed number is 30. If it’s 10 dingers and 50 steals, then the Power/Speed is 16.7. Mr. James has used this methodology for various combinations over the years.
Anyway, I figured I could answer my question with the HR/Avg number. As it turns out, and if you give it more than a moment’s thought you’ll see, this doesn’t work very well. The all-time leaders in HR/Avg are Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds. Their huge homerun totals pull the HR/Avg number up well beyond anyone else; however, their homerun totals are more than double their batting averages. That’s not what I was looking for.
So, I did something much simpler. (Why I didn’t think of Occam’s Razor earlier in the process is beyond me and a source of frustration.) I calculated the percentage difference between a player’s career homers and batting average. I included everyone who hit more than 200 HRs – 357 players.
Is Kyle Seager at the top of the list? Um, no. He ranks 42nd with a difference of 3.59%. There’s actually one player who retired with matching homerun and batting average totals of 270, Vernon Wells. Here’s the top 5:
- Vernon Wells, 270 HR, .270 average, difference 0.00%
- Ryan Klesko, 278, .279, 0.36%
- Brooks Robinson, 268, .267, 0.37%
- Bob Allison, 256, .255, 0.39%
- Andre Thornton, 253, .255, 0.39%
The leader among active players (checks Baseball Reference to see if Matt Kemp played in 2021 – he didn’t) is Mike Trout with 310 round-trippers and a .305 average, a difference of 1.61%. Mike Freakin’ Trout. He’s at the top of all the lists! Assuming we have baseball this season and that Trout plays more than he was able to in 2021, he won’t be able to maintain this because his homer total will climb significantly.
Here’s a link to the spreadsheet (I have no idea if this will actually work or not): https://onedrive.live.com/edit.aspx?resid=5F00D42799A2CD98!1166&ithint=file%2cxlsx&wdLOR=cC1EAA614-6A3F-4C79-8ADA-997A21580AEF&authkey=!AF757GC3GEfsm6o